Libertarian Examples Mega-Thread

[remember]

32 minutes ago, tenta said:

As if that would justify overpricing food, obviously it wouldn't.

its basically a hommage to joseph beuys fat corner, probably. i once met a woman who was friends with him that time he did the first one - he did not even have to pay for raw material. how disastrous. don’t know if he ever got money for his fat works. playing with food is def tooooo liberal. and don’t do it at home if you have a carpet.

 

Edited July 9, 2020 by remember

[Leo Gura]

7 hours ago, Joel3102 said:

@Leo Gura Does this mean you disagree with the idea of worker owned co-ops which are a popular idea amongst socialists/soc-dems these days?

I'm open to it. We need to move in that direction. But unlike most socialists I'm not naive enough to think that it will all just auto-magically work without leadership. Co-ops will need leadership.

We need more co-ops, but we need more conscious, visionary leadership too.

[Girzo]

I know a local farmers co-op that had pushed hard on being completely flat but eventually gave up because when they grew people just naturally treated founders and people with longer membership as leaders.

Rotation of new members has also been a problem, someone who has to introduce them to all the concepts in a way becomes a mentor to them, their views on the co-op influence choices of the new members and if they fall out before creating their own opinions it seems like the training person has more power in decisions. Plus constant going in and out of organization creates instability.

Edited July 10, 2020 by Girzo

[Leo Gura]

2 hours ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

but they do have leadership, the coops elect their own leaders.

I know, but I'm still skeptical if this will work in areas that require serious leadership, vision, and innovation.

[Leo Gura]

19 minutes ago, Husseinisdoingfine said:

No one is advocating that the economy be 100% be reduced to co op businesses. Lol, can you imagine how much of a disaster that would be?

I honestly don't know if it would be a disaster or an triumph. It's hard to predict. It needs empirical testing.

The whole trick with new social systems is that no one can really predict ahead of time whether they will work. It requires experimentation and fine-tuning in an evolutionary manner.

[Girzo]

Rule of a thumb says if it's stage Green type of co-op then it should be more effective than stage Orange meritocratic hierarchy.

There might be a few unsuccessful adaptations of stage Green values to business at first, but eventually it all should end up in creating a better model for business, assuming the pattern holds for stage Green. If not, then we will have to skip to Yellow's self-organizing teams and natural hierarchies.

[Leo Gura]

31 minutes ago, Girzo said:

Rule of a thumb says if it's stage Green type of co-op then it should be more effective

1) Green must build on top of the accomplishments of Orange, not outright reject them. The difficulty is figuring out which aspects of Orange to ditch and which to keep. There is no simple answer to that question.

2) Just cause it's Green doesn't make it more effective. Green's metrics for success are different than Orange. Green is more about relationship and community than raw productive output. Hippies aren't exactly well-known for their effectiveness. But, hey, maybe that's a better way to measure biz effectiveness.

[Girzo]

@Leo Gura Have you read "Reinventing Organizations" by Laloux? It's full of concepts and examples that would match the more earthly direction your channel has taken recently. I find it a way more interesting read than other Spiral Dynamics books.

Edited July 10, 2020 by Girzo

[Parththakkar12]

I can see only one way to truly make this co-op situation work. The following conditions must be met:

• Everyone is competent, productive and self-motivated
• Everyone is in their life purpose and knows what they're contributing
• People place their life purpose above individual goals like money, status, etc.
• Their life purposes align with each other.
• Everyone is a good and competent leader, people know what they're doing in their professional relationships.

If these conditions aren't met, good luck making it work. I don't think it stands a chance. People are too achievement-driven and survivalistic to self-sacrifice for the community, especially if you've moved through Orange into Green.

At Blue, okay, maybe they can be self-sacrificing, but of course we know what happens at Blue. Fascism, authoritarianism, strict hierarchies.

[Leo Gura]

I think it could work the way pirate ships worked. The pirate ship was basically a co-op model. But it wasn't flat. It had hierarchy and strong leadership, but every pirate, even the greenhorn, would get a percentage share of all the loot.

So, the captain might get 1/3 share.

His lieutenants might get 1/15th share.

And the lowest greenhorn sailor might get 1/100th share.

As you rise up the ranks and gain more experience and responsibility, your share increases.

This all basically boils down to how ownership and spoils get distributed.

The federal gov could basically mandate that each corporation with over 10, 50, or 100 employees must adopt this share model or face heavy fines/taxes.

[Parththakkar12]

11 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

I think it could work the way pirate ships worked. The pirate ship was basically a co-op model.

That's an insult to my man Jack Sparrow

[Parththakkar12]

18 minutes ago, Leo Gura said:

So, the captain might get 1/3 share.

His lieutenants might get 1/15th share.

And the lowest greenhorn sailor might get 1/100th share.

As you rise up the ranks and gain more experience and responsibility, your share increases.

This all basically boils down to how ownership and spoils get distributed.

The federal gov could basically mandate that each corporation with over 10, 50, or 100 employees must adopt this share model or face heavy fines/taxes.

Interesting idea. I don't know of many lower-ranked employees who would like to share the loss margins if the higher-ups mess up though. Would this require them to invest in the stocks of their company too?

It will take immense levels of trust between people. It could work. I'd say it's worth a shot.

[Leo Gura]

13 minutes ago, Parththakkar12 said:

Interesting idea. I don't know of many lower-ranked employees who would like to share the loss margins if the higher-ups mess up though. Would this require them to invest in the stocks of their company too?

It will take immense levels of trust between people. It could work. I'd say it's worth a shot.

I think the most you'd stand to lose is your share of future profits and your job.

The low level employees would not invest their own money. They would be given the share of ex-employees who left the company.

Basically the company would constantly be reallocating shares based on who's working, how much work they do, and how valuable their work is. If you leave the company, you lose all your shares. If the company makes no profit, you gain no bonus, but you still get a base salary. If the company goes bankrupt you lose your job and your shares.

Basically the point is to make sure that no one who isn't working in the company can buy shares. Only workers should be allowed to have a share of the profits, not outside speculators or Wall Street wolves.

The billion dollar question I have is this: is it possible to entirely abolish Wall Street? Or does Wall Street actually serve a necessary role? Could we construct a society and economy in which Wall Street's role would be made completely obsolete? I'm not sure, but it's a question worth seriously exploring.

Of course it should be obvious now why the people in power absolutely HATE this idea and will do everything in their power not to even consider it as a possibility. Those in power primarily thrive off the labor of others, yet they MUST deny this in their own minds.

[Leo Gura]

Here's an example of the common libertarian mistake of thinking that local government is better and less oppressive/corrupt than centralized government. The caller fundamentally misunderstands issues of scale and the fact that local gov is MORE corrupt due to its self-biased nature.

 

[Leo Gura]

 

[Joel3102]

 

[Hello from Russia]

Are liberals and libertarians different or they are the same? I am a bit confused

Edited July 12, 2020 by Hello from Russia

[Leo Gura]

20 minutes ago, Hello from Russia said:

Are liberals and libertarians different or they are the same? I am a bit confused

Different

[Eren Eeager]

@Hello from Russia

I was confused too the first time I heard the phrase " libertarian" I thought it mean liberal too , lol!!. To my surprise  it was almost the opposite.

[Apparition of Jack]

@Hello from Russia  Liberals believe in social freedoms like gay marriage and marijuana use, but will also support a degree of government intervention into the economy such as public housing or minimum wages to prevent it from being too cruel on workers.

Libertarians usually also believe in social freedoms (although some can be conservative), but will oppose almost all government interventions into the economy because they believe the free market is the "fairest" method of distributing resources. If it ends up being cruel they don't usually see that as a problem.